mmhmm.

This ABSOLUTELY works.

I have used this for many years. Definitely b do it.

This article was super long-winded so I screenshat the important part

the fact we’re responsible for getting doctors to “lower their defenses” in order to literally just do their jobs is ✨INFURIATING✨

Also have seen a tip where you say "My aunt so and so told me she had these symptoms before she was diagnosed with XYZ. It really scared me that hers almost got missed. Could we please exhaustively rule this out? It really messed her up because they caught it so late and I don't want that to happen to me, and hey, it might not be a bad idea to check that stuff anyway."

Ridiculous that we have to do this, but until medicine gets it's shit together we have to wrap what we already know in cheese, like you would pill a dog.

And yeah, bringing someone with you can help a lot, especially adult and traditionally masculine men. Disgusting!

I do this a lot. Like, a lot. The words 'my wife is worried about' are like a secret weapon for me.

having thick hair and going to get your hair cut is just having to listen to your hair dresser repeat over and over again how millions of people would commit despicable crimes to have your hair

lol I am in such a stressed-out blind rage today from insurance bullshit that I wrote up a glossary of health insurance terms (things like deductibles, premiums, and copays) because all the free guides online are unnecessarily complicated and the only way you can squeeze a dime out of these bullshit companies is to understand their overly-complicated policies. give em hell

This is a GREAT guide folks - it’s simple, straightforward, and deals well with the overly complicated alphabet soup of medical insurance. Knowing this stuff can prove REALLY helpful, and the examples used are a great resource. 

me looking at john singer sargents watercolours: Just Fuck Of...

:////

(Adding some of his alligator watercolors to this post)

personal playlists i’ve made that might fit your niche

more!

this leaves out the most crucial tip you'll ever need:

-site:pinterest.*

excludes the entirety of pinterest's evil domainverse from image search

Reblogging for the Pinterest addition

I think you mean “reblog for the pinterest subtraction”

I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot.

Knowing I'm not alone in having these experiences, I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers, and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood's biggest films, to get to the bottom of what's going on. One person refused to talk to me, saying it would be "professional suicide" to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk, but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about the topic, and it quickly became apparent that this is a familiar subject among the folks in the sound community, since they're the ones who often bear the brunt of complaints about dialogue intelligibility. 

TLDR:

its hard to hear words in movies because

1. directors like Christopher Nolan record fuzzy dialogue to make it more "realistic"

2. actors mumble or whisper to act their characters, and making it louder can't usually make the words clear in the finished movie

3. microphones have to be placed away from visual setpieces so they can't be seen in the finished movie, making it harder to put them where they can record the best audio

4. sound designers not being respected and time crunches with production mean they're often told to "fix it in post" (while editing the film) instead of being allowed to record good audio

5. people add extra sounds because they can add them easier now

6. working on a movie for so long means you can get so used to hearing the fuzzy words correctly that you don't realize other people can't understand it

7. sometimes movies are released too loud, and so movie theaters turn down the volume for all movies, making normal-volume movies too quiet

8. movie theater employees are more inexperienced and play the movie as it is originally, instead of making sure it sounds good like they did when they used projectors

9. some streaming platforms compress the audio too much, making it low quality and too hard to understand

10. tvs also sometimes change how the audio sounds

11. not all films have their sound changed by the people making it to sound good on a home tv

the article ends by talking about ways to fix all this, mostly by educating people about why sound design is important

This tracks.

That’s one tiny part of the problem, but it’s not the issue. That’s not why the government refuses to consider canceling student loan debt. It’s actually a lot worse than anyone imagines.

The reason the government refuses to even entertain student loan forgiveness is because of something called SLABS. What are SLABS, you ask? Good question. Because the world of finance really does not want you to know this! SLABS are Student Loan Asset Backed Securities. Sounds like a bunch of confusing terms that regular people can’t understand, right? It’s supposed to.

A lot of you were too young to remember what happened in 2008, and what exactly the crisis was that brought the entire economy to its knees. 1 million people lost their homes. It’s because the mortgage industry was taking the mortgages (loans) that individuals opened, split them into tiny little pieces, bundled them together with other tiny little pieces of other people’s loans, and sold them off. A huge industry was created that not only bought little pieces of people’s mortgages, but also made bets on whether or not those underlying securities (pieces of mortgage loans) would fail or succeed. It didn’t take long before the bets on the loans outsized the actual loans themselves - sometimes by a magnitude of thousands.

I know this is complicated, but hang in there. Here’s Selena Gomez in “The Big Short” to explain that betting a little better: 

Okay, so you’ve got lots of people betting on mortgages. See what happens next, is that the banks run out of qualified people for mortgages. There’s only so many people who had jobs that paid them enough and credit scores high enough to be deemed worthy. But they want to keep their cash cow going! What to do?

Of course, the way this problem was solved, was to hand out mortgages to everyone like free T-shirts. No job? No credit? No way to pay that mortgage we just gave you? No problem. They were making more money on the bets than on the underlying loans. They didn’t give a shit if you defaulted. They were making money on you whether you paid or not. And they didn’t care if you destroyed your life and your credit and your family because the financial industry was raking in massive piles of cash by selling and betting on people’s home loans. Eventually the house of cards came tumbling down, there was a massive foreclosure crisis, the industry was found to be operating completely fraudulently, and a million people lost their houses. Large financial institutions received a bail-out that we the taxpayers paid for. The individual families who got exploited and fucked? Got nothing.

So what does this have to do with student loans? Excellent question. The same thing that happened with mortgage loans being split into tiny pieces, bundled, and sold off has also happened with student loans. These bundles are called SLABS. Student loan asset-backed security. But wait! “Asset-backed”?? What asset? The asset is ostensibly...your degree.

This is now a potentially bigger problem than even the housing crisis in 2008: because back in ‘08, if you defaulted (stopped paying) on your mortgage loan, there was a physical asset to seize: your house. You can’t seize somebody’s English degree if they stop paying. This is why it’s nearly impossible to discharge any student loan debt, ever: because the industry making money off of student loans is making outsized bets that are larger than the underlying assets. Just like in 2008. If student loans were forgiven across the board, the ripple effect would capsize the domestic economy. Your $20,000 in student loans? Could represent $2 million in bets made on that loan.

This has already become an enormous hot potato between financial institutions as student loan repayment was paused during the pandemic. Suddenly there’s no payoff for these bets institutions are making on your student loans. There’s also no collateral they can repossess. What they thought was a profitable bet to exploit students and keep people in wage slavery forever, is shakier and shakier. When it finally bursts and goes tits-up, you can bet that the people who bought tiny pieces of your loans and then gambled it away will be the ones receiving a (tax-payer funded) bail-out. Not the students. And it’s already starting to go tits-up.

America: we’re #1. 🤮

Absolutely fantastic Investopedia article about SLABS

please for the love of god do not buy (k)n95 masks on amazon... a good majority of the time they're fake and overpriced. if you want legit good quality masks i would personally recommend bonafide masks. they're reputable and reasonably priced, you can get a pack of 50 for a dollar a piece.

and remember each mask can be reused (up to five times) so long as you decontaminate them (clearer instructions here) five days before reuse.

tldr instructions:

stay safe!!!

I'd argue that reusing can happen more than 5 times even without decontamination... It seems like used filter masks are still more effective than cloth

3liza has a big thread going in Twitter and pulled in some resources from the mask nerd

"via @masknerd, a study on what happens when an n95 gets soaked in gross sweat and dried out and reused: nothing! it still works great https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00054 "

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1477438673473859584?t=2EQeC3FWy1Ay0FwE3xMVDw&s=19

Thread also has links to some sourcing resources and additional papers/discussion.

also projectn95.org sources validated n95s and kn95s and gives other covid info etc

this is sort of vague because I'm not sure if I can make it make sense but I wish more 101 nonbinary activist materials focused less on just "gender isn't binary" and more on "the fact that gender is a social construct means it is constructed differently in different cultures and is in a constant state of change like everything else about a culture"

like...it's not just about updating the gender system to recognize non-binary genders but also about recognizing that the social construction of gender is extremely responsive to time/place and this is true even for "man" and "woman" which means that there's no reason to invalidate anyone's expression or feelings about their gender, no matter what gender it is or how familiar it is to you

a further thought: this is also why I don't think gender abolition is a useful goal, because, as Rikki Anne Wilchins put it, gender is primarily a system for creating meanings, and if you actually tried to totally erase the concept of any gender at all from the world, that would involve erasing a huge amount of cultural meaning, probably without actually fixing inequality tbh

on the other hand, if you acknowledge that there are as many gender systems as there are cultures, and that there are probably as many variations on even the normative genders as there are people in that culture who belong to them, then gender essentialism loses the vast majority of its power because if the meaning of gender changes across cultures (even across relatively small cultural shifts), then that means they're not inherent moral truths of the universe, they're ways of performing particular cultural meanings

and this makes non-binary genders, and nonnormative gender expressions, no less concrete than binary genders with normative expressions, not by saying "actually a non-binary gender is a concrete object with xyz characteristics" but by saying "all genders are arbitrary", which creates room for essentially infinite space and self-determination

I have no idea if any of this makes sense, I just visualize, like, a garden

Any attempt to categorize anything requires that a generalization be made. Saying “abolish gender” is like saying “abolish language.” Language, like gender, is a construct. Of course the words we construct will never perfectly encapsulate reality, but without words there is no understanding and no communication. The goal cannot be to get rid of constructs, but to recognize their limitations and leave room for constructs to evolve.

alright let's talk about Apple and Tumblr's current predicament. If you don't know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what's going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like 'long post' are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.

honestly i just think we all need to slow down

like. im serious. when was the last time you read a book and paid attention to every word and actually tried to absorb what you were reading. when was the last time you saw a piece of art and considered the hours it took to bring it into fruition. when was the last time you closed your eyes when listening to an album for a first time and kept them closed until the final song ended. have you gone to the park lately just to watch the birds fly from perch to perch? have you stopped to count your blessings?

if you were a young girl from 2007-2012 then The Camisole was your only defense against the terrible onslaught of uncomfortable youth fashion. every shirt from that era was a low cut scoop neck/v-neck and every pair of jeans was low-rise; the camisole stitched these miserable garments into a complete outfit in the same was that frankenstein’s monster was fashioned a complete man. The Camisole has done more for society than our troops.

Sometimes I’m looking for something online - often “how to” articles - and I want to filter for - like - a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience. I don’t want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesn’t understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I don’t know what search settings to put into Google to get this.

thank you for articulating this cri de coeur for me

ngl these days i’m just happy when it’s not a video

search.marginalia.nu is the search engine you want!

“It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.“

maybe this is bc i’m from the south and not fuckin uhhhh new york or wherever the hell but like. it is still not really normalized for a man to wear makeup or nail polish. women with short hair still get offensive comments about their appearances. like even small acts of gender nonconformity can still be scary and dangerous in 2021 and i feel like so many people just live in this progressive bubble where they think that all dudes being Remotely “feminine” in some way are like homophobic tiktok e-boys doing it for clout or whatever and that’s uh. fucking stupid. like i can PROMISE you that the vast majority of gender nonconforming people are not trying to do something that’s never been done before, nor are they claiming to do so, they’re just trying to live their lives and look the way they want to look. you aren’t helping anybody by trying to police who has the right to be wearing skirts or painting their nails or doing their hair a certain way.

anyway this is ur daily reminder that gender nonconformity is not a trend and it’s gross to attack people for being gender nonconforming in a way that you think “has been done before” or “isn’t that special” or whatever the fuck. like i’m sorry but it’s just cruel and hateful! being gender nonconforming still takes bravery and courage. people still face discrimination and harassment. whose cause do you think you’re helping by attempting to be the gatekeeper of nontraditional gender expression? genuinely, who do you think benefits when you attack people for stepping outside of the bounds of traditional gender expression? who? because it certainly fucking isn’t gnc people.